The Girl's Book of Math

THE GIRUS BOOK OF MATH/ Leslie Daniels WILDGIRL'S ADVICE ON HOW TO HEAL A BROKEN HEART: DANCE A LOT. Do anything that involves music so long as it doesn't involve musicians. Think of a rude name for your ex. How about Roughtrade? Think of borrowing fifty dollars from your roommate and offering it to your ex to let you piss on him. He needs the money. Your ex is in your body still so lose weight, almost every American can. Stop eating. You'll be one of those girls, those spare lines that own the city. The lines say to hell with food, to hell with eating, give me sex and art. Give me a cigarette. Touch me in a public place. Rub your knuckle between the legs of my jeans, there's lots of space. Laugh till you cry. Cry till you laugh. Get a motto. Send your ex an unsigned two-hundred-dollar check and this note: / know you are having money troubles. I would sign this if you let me urinate on you. As ever, Try these mottos: Go fast till it gets good, then slow down. Life is a drug, so boot it. Don't fall in love again yet, wait till you forget your ex's phone number, or six weeks, whichever comes first. Don't go to a therapist. Remember, you are vulnerable now and it's a bad time to get help, you could really get to depend on it. Think about if your uncle would lend you money, maybe five hundred dollars. Tell your uncle it's for rent. It is, you want to rent your ex for a degrading act. More mottos: Motion is everything. Avoid sentiment. Seek beauty in ugliness, at least nobody will bother you. Don't go to the movies. Movies try to sell you a shiny, stupid life. You have a life. Realize one day you don't want to piss on him, you want to want to piss on him. Call that Health. The Missouri Review · 47 "For thirty-two cents, a man in a blue uniform will not carry six inches of slightly soiled lace seven miles, but for forty-two cents he will," said Tina. She dropped a pair of pink underpants into a shoebox. The panties had been an early love token to Jerry, who returned them in an envelope that arrived marked "insufficient postage." Her roommate, Everardo, had given the postman a dime. The shoebox contained four mugs with TINA on them, several very large tee shirts and a pile of letters from Jerry that she had been trying to read to Everardo all morning. Ev was smoking a half-joint from the night before and sipping espresso from a tiny blue cup. He had suggested Tina clean house to help her over her broken heart. At least get rid of Jerry's old tee shirts, he said, I can smell them from the sidewalk. Ev believed in cleaning and ironing. He believed the world had only two kinds of people in it, the ones who made their beds and the others. Tina's bed was a loft in the room where they kept all their clothes. When he worked, Ev was a stylist for fashion shoots. When he slept home, it was on the couch in the living room. They called the couch "she," as in, "I'll sleep on her tonight." Since Jerry had dumped Tina, they never said "he" at all, everything male or just plain had become she. I have a wife, Jerry had told Tina last weekend, like he had just remembered it. Where? Tina wanted to know. Kutztown, I'm going back there. What? Tina said and she kept saying it for a week. It had been a long week. Tina spent a lot of it crying in the biology lab of the University of Pennsylvania where she worked. Her eyes stayed puffy. They went from morning pale and puffy to late afternoon red and puffy. Everardo was trying to help her rally. On the bathroom door he had drawn a chart. The X axis was time, and the Y axis was missing Jerry...